Reading Lives. On the Theory of Biography Around 1800

This publication examines the prerequisites of the biographic construction of individuality at the epochal threshold around 1800. In 1777, Johann Georg Wiggers publishes the first German monograph entitled Ueber die Biographie (On Biography) explicitly devoted to the question how a biography were to be written. The topic is virulent due to the fact that in previous years a number of shorter pieces was published as part of an academic dispute on the epistemological, pedagogical and anthropological status of biographical writing. By examining selected texts from this debate, the first book-length study on this topic aims to retrace the historical constellation at the origin of modern German biography. It investigates the trajectories leading to the eminent status of life stories as transmedial narratives still persisting to the present day. Complementary perspectives explore amongst others the role of biography as a tool of collective memory, the relation between pictorial and narrative representation of a subject and the capacity of biographical identification. Furthermore, the study examines biographical collections, a common genre for the eighteenth century, focussing on the interplay of diverging life narratives opposed to the individual life story. The different topics of this investigation are united by the question of what it means to perceive a subject as the sum of his/her life. The theory of biography as it is developed by the texts in question drafts an hermeneutic idea of man, that analogous to a book aims to render a human being `readable`. The investigation demonstrates how the cultural significance of biographical life narratives from the end of the eighteenth century up until the present is based on the assumption that a subject can be interpreted through the individual story of her/his life, much like a literary text. Thus, she/he becomes comprehensible and is ultimately transformed from a living existence to an object of cultural knowledge.